John Harris writes: “Reform is apparently in deep trouble, yet also still in with a serious chance. How come?” (Don’t discount Reform because it’s had a bad year. In our angry, fragile democracy, anything can happen, 20 September). Because it is a cult, just as Maga is a cult. It is sustained by faith, not fact. It offers simple solutions to problems of such complexity that most of us are incapable of understanding them.
Reform UK would not exist without Nigel Farage. All his other “parties” only existed because of him. Its self-designation as outside “the establishment” is one of the few truths to be relied on – in the sense that it’s beyond the pale. It is an ethics-free zone. Farage is the tool of the US hard right in the UK. All that’s missing is the Christian end-times nihilism, and not many would be surprised if that clawed its way to the surface soon.
Harris maintains that the next general election will be driven by emotion – all choices are. Our biochemistry sees to that before our prefrontal cortex even engages. And the choice will be stark. It will be about “me” or “we”. Do we each retreat to our own little “green zone” or do we hang on to that glimmer of hope and work together?
I believe Andy Burnham is sincere in his desire to do politics differently, but I am disturbed that he has said nothing yet about the systemic change necessary for a new, people-focused politics. The founding of a commission to inform a citizens’ assembly on voting reform would be a clear indication that he means what he says. I live in hope.
Lyn Dade
Twickenham, London
The threat that a Reform-led government poses to the UK is summed up in John Harris’s use of the phrase “munificently funded barbarism”. The rise of Reform and its ruthless rhetoric has helped generate the growth of violent racist militia-styled groups on our streets, whose increasing presence not only intimidates whole communities but creates an atmosphere of lawlessness and insecurity. Simultaneously, billionaires suddenly see an opportunity to buy influence in the UK’s democracy – loudly denied – and elsewhere tax exiles such as Jim Ratcliffe seem empowered to rant about Britain’s decline from when it was the greatest empire in the world.
Barbarism, it seems, can attract both interest and vast sums of money from some of the wealthiest people in the world. That alliance of munificent funding and barbarism should alert Andy Burnham and his Labour colleagues and all of us who value and want to protect our increasingly fragile democracy.
Peter Riddle
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
John Harris mentions Aneurin Bevan, one of whose most famous quotes was: “The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.” This is something that many Labour MPs, and perhaps Harris, having read many of his opinion pieces, need to engage with. Their blanket kneejerk opposition, for example, to any justifiable scrutiny of the welfare budget is music to the ears of Reform. Hope and communities at ease with themselves will only follow from credible policy priorities married to fiscal competence.
Roger Whitmore
Bath
